Archive for the ‘Arab Christians’ Category

Islamic Leaflet: We Don’t Want The Pope To Visit [Islamic Apartheid “Palestine”]
Tensions Fly Over Trip To Nazareth
By DAVID BEDEIN, Middle East Correspondent
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Nazareth, Israel — A fiery leaflet disseminated by Muslims in Nazareth against the Pope’s scheduled visit next month has Israeli police concerned they could riot during the visit.

Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to arrive in Nazareth in another three weeks and tensions in the city can be easily seen…

JAFFA, Israel – Members of Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization were arrested yesterday
for allegedly leading a 2006 anti-Christian attack in which gunmen set fire to
the Young Men’s Christian Association in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya, WND
has learned.

Following the arrest of four militants in conjunction with
the attack, Rabih Elkhangy, the Fatah mayor of Qalqiliya, held a press
conference yesterday in which he claimed the arrested attackers were from the
rival Hamas terror organization.

But WND has learned that of the four
arrested, two are Fatah members, one is a Fatah sympathizer and the fourth is a
member of Jihadiya Silafiya, a Palestinian Islamist organization ideologically
allied with al-Qaida values.

Sources in the security organizations of
Qalqiliya admitted Hamas members were not arrested for the attack. They pointed
out most Hamas leaders from Qalqiliya were jailed by the PA in recent months for
other purposes.

Palestinian Christians live in constant fear National Post, Canada … The problem is not their behaviour but, in the eyes of the violent Islamist jihadists, their very presence. They must simply live in hope that some faraway event does not inflame the anti-Christian wrath of their neighbours. Is it any wonder that Christians in such situations desire to emigrate? Could anyone judge harshly the few thousand Christians in Gaza if they were to leave entirely?… and the fact that it [the YMCA attack] was not big news, illustrates the dire situation faced by many Christians living in the Palestinian territories.

Lebanon questions 4 over deadly blast… Hajj led a three-month military campaign that crushed an al-Qaida-inspired militant group known as Fatah Islam in Nahr el-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp …http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22252963

January 25, 2007 – Aid conference in Paris pledges more than $7.6 billion to help Lebanon recover from the war.

February 13 – Three people are killed in two bomb blasts near a Christian village northeast of Beirut.

June 13 – Anti-Syrian parliamentarian Walid Eido and five other people killed by a car bomb near a Beirut beach club

September 2 – Lebanese troops seize complete control of Nahr al-Bared camp after months of fighting with Fatah al-Islam militants. More than 420 people, including 168 soldiers, have been killed in the worst internal violence since the civil war.

September 25 – Parliament postpones a presidential election for the first of eight times in a bid to break a deadlock over a consensus candidate and end the political crisis. France leads mediation efforts for a deal on a presidential candidate.

November 23 – President Emile Lahoud leaves presidential palace

at the end of his term, without a successor.

November 24 – Siniora says his cabinet is assuming executive powers in the absence of a president.

January 25, 2007 – Aid conference in Paris pledges more than $7.6 billion to help Lebanon recover from the war.

February 13 – Three people are killed in two bomb blasts near a Christian village northeast of Beirut.

June 13 – Anti-Syrian parliamentarian Walid Eido and five other people killed by a car bomb near a Beirut beach club.

September 2 – Lebanese troops seize complete control of Nahr al-Bared camp after months of fighting with Fatah al-Islam militants. More than 420 people, including 168 soldiers, have been killed in the worst internal violence since the civil war.

September 25 – Parliament postpones a presidential election for the first of eight times in a bid to break a deadlock over a consensus candidate and end the political crisis. France leads mediation efforts for a deal on a presidential candidate.

November 23 – President Emile Lahoud leaves presidential palace

at the end of his term, without a successor.

November 24 – Siniora says his cabinet is assuming executive powers in the absence of a president.

An older background of Islamic massacres on Christians, Lebanon 1976, Damour Massacre (that was the cause for Christian Arabs massacring “Palestinians” in Sabra Shatila in 1982) carried out by “Palestinian” Muslims and Syrian occupation

Expert: ‘Christian groups in PA to disappear’
Etgar Lefkovits , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 4, 2007
The ever-dwindling Christian communities living in
Palestinian- run territories in the West Bank and Gaza are likely
to dissipate completely within the next 15 years as a result of
increasing Muslim persecution and maltreatment, an Israeli
scholar said Monday.

“The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in
Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the
international community, human rights activists, the media and
NGOs,” said Justus Reid Weiner, an international human rights
lawyer in an address at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
where he serves as a scholar in residence.

He cited Muslim harassment and persecution as the main cause of
the “acute human rights crisis” facing Christian Arabs, and
predicted that unless governments or institutions step in to
remedy the situation – such as with job opportunities – there
will be no more Christian communities living in the Palestinians
territories within 15 years, with only a few Western Christians
and top clergymen left in the area.

“Christian leaders are being forced to abandon their followers to
the forces of radical Islam,” Weiner said.

Facing a pernicious mixture of persecution and economic hardships
as a result of years of Palestinian violence and Israeli
counter-terrorism measures, tens of thousands of Christian Arabs
have left the Palestinian territories for a better life in the
West, in a continuing exodus which has led some Christian leaders
to warn that the faith could be virtually extinct in its
birthplace in a matter of decades.

The Palestinian Christian population has dipped to 1.5 percent of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, down from at least 15% a half
century ago, according to some estimates.

No one city in the Holy Land is more indicative of the great
exodus of Christians than Bethlehem, which fell under full
Palestinian control last decade as part of the Oslo Accords.

The town of 30,000 is now less than 20% Christian, after decades
when Christians were the majority. Elsewhere in the Palestinian
territories, only about 3,000 Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox,
live in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, out of a strongly conservative
Muslim population of 1.4 million.

“In a society where Arab Christians have no voice and no
protection it is no surprise that they are leaving,” he said.

In his address, Weiner pointedly downplayed the effects that
Israeli security measures, such as the security barrier being
built between Israel and the West Bank, have had on the Christian
Arabs living in the West Bank.

The barrier, which is especially conspicuous at the entrance to
Bethlehem where it is a concrete wall, is an issue which many
Palestinian Christian clerics have pointed to, along with the
ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as a central cause of
Christian emigration.

Weiner argued there was a “180 degree difference” between the
public statements coming out of the mainstream Christian
leadership in the Holy Land – who “sing the PA’s tune” and blame
Israel for all the Christian Arabs’ ills – and people’s
experience on the ground.

“The truth is beginning to come out,” he said. “The question is
what is being done with the truth.”

His comments come just months after a prominent Christian
activist, Rami Khader Ayyad, 32, was killed in Gaza.

“For too long the plight of Christian Arabs has been put on the
back-burner or ignored altogether,” said Rev. Malcolm Hedding,
executive director of the International Christian Embassy, a
Jerusalem-based evangelical organization.

The Evangelical leader, who has drawn the wrath of Catholic
leaders in the Holy Land for his strong support for Israel, said
that “power politics” has prevented the major Christian leaders
in the Holy Land from speaking out on this issue.

“There is a one-sided debate in which Israel is responsible for
everything,” he said. “The Christian world needs to stand up and
speak out about this.”

Christians Are Persona Non Grata in Gaza
From Christians Are Persona Non Grata in Gaza: The murder on Oct. 7 of Rami Ayad, who worked at Gaza’s Bible Society, has persuaded many in the 3,000-strong Christian community they are no longer welcome in Gaza. He had been stabbed several times and shot in the head.